Former Travis County Medical Examiner Roberto Bayardo says his testimony in the 1998 capital trial of Rodney Reed for the sexual assault and killing of Stacey Stites was misconstrued by prosecutors to suggest a solid timeline for Stites' death, and to prove that Reed had sexually assaulted Stites. But that, he now says, is not at all what he found.

Texas slapped the U.S. Supreme Court in the face, and the justices just took it.

On Tuesday night, Texas executed Marvin Wilson, whose IQ score was 61 -- low enough that it should have met any standard for "diminished mental capacity." Shockingly, the court did not intervene to stop the execution despite its 2002 decision in Atkins v. Virginia barring the execution of the "mentally retarded" as "cruel and unusual punishment" in violation of the Eighth Amendment.

The injustice system has again victimized Anthony Porter

A CHICAGO man who 10 years ago came within days of being murdered by the Illinois execution machine before he was proven innocent is going back to jail--for taking sticks of deodorant from a South Side drugstore.

Anthony Porter was arrested at a Walgreens drugstore just blocks from his house last fall. He pled guilty to retail theft and was given a prison sentence of one year--even though the value of what he took amounted to a few dollars.

Such a sentence would be a cruel injustice no matter who got it, but it's especially grotesque happening to Porter.

In 1999, after spending 17 years behind bars for a crime he didn't commit, Porter became the 10th person released from Illinois' death row in about as many years. With the state's execution system coming under growing scrutiny, his case came to stand for everything that was wrong with capital punishment in Illinois.

A death row prisoner who has been medically diagnosed as "mentally retarded" and therefore exempt from execution is set to die on Tuesday in Texas, a state that rejects scientific consensus and instead applies its own definition of learning difficulties based on a character in a John Steinbeck novel.

Barring a last minute intervention by the courts, Marvin Wilson, 54, will be put to death by lethal injection even though he has been subjected to scientifically-recognised tests that show him to be intellectually disabled – or "mentally retarded" as the US legal system still calls the condition.

The Supreme Court banned the death penalty for mentally retarded offenders a decade ago, but Georgia apparently has not gotten the message. It is the only state with a statute requiring a defendant to meet the unfairly heavy burden of proving retardation beyond a reasonable doubt. This stringent standard could be readily manipulated by experts, resulting in unconstitutional executions.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court says it’s unconstitutional to sentence juveniles to life in prison without parole for murder.

The high court on Monday threw out Americans’ ability to send children to prison for the rest of their lives with no chance of ever getting out. The 5-4 decision is in line with others the court has made, including ruling out the death penalty for juveniles and life without parole for young people whose crimes did not involve killing.

The decision came in the robbery and murder cases of Evan Miller and Kuntrell Jackson, who were 14 when they were convicted.

Miller was convicted of killing a man in Alabama. Jackson was convicted of being an accomplice in an Arkansas robbery that ended in murder.

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By Anthony Graves, who spent years in solitary confinement on Texas’ death row before being proven innocent in 2010. Yesterday he testified about the experience at a Senate subcommittee hearing on solitary confinement. His website is www.anthonybelieves.com.

On November 1, 1994, I heard the gavel fall and the judge announce, “Anthony Graves, I hereby sentence you to death by lethal injection.” The jury had already convicted me of murdering six people and burning down their house down to cover up the crime. I was completely innocent: they had the wrong guy. I was scared of dying for a crime I did not commit, but I believed in my innocence and hoped someone, somewhere would make it right.

Nineteen-year-old Stacey Stites was found dead in a wooded area just off a county road in Bastrop, Texas, in 1996. She was half-naked, with Reed’s DNA inside her. The DNA was the “Cinderella’s slipper,” special prosecutor Lisa Tanner told the jury at trial: it matched Reed’s; therefore, Reed was the murderer.

Reversing its decade-long objection to testing that death row inmate Hank Skinner says could prove his innocence, the Texas Attorney General's office today filed an advisory with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals seeking to test DNA in the case.

"Upon further consideration, the State believes that the interest of justice would best be served by DNA testing the evidence requested by Skinner and by testing additional items identified by the state," lawyers for the state wrote in the advisory.

Skinner, now 50, was convicted in 1995 of the strangulation and beating death of his girlfriend Twila Busby and the stabbing deaths of her two adult sons on New Year’s Eve 1993 in Pampa. Skinner maintains he is innocent and was unconscious on the couch at the time of the killings, intoxicated from a mixture of vodka and codeine.